LIGHTS OUT: The Abyss Gazes Also Into You

Director: David F. Sandberg
Writer: Eric Heisserer
Cast: Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Maria Bello, Alexander DiPersia, Alicia Vela-Bailey
Runtime: 81 mins.
2016

Horror is trendy. Like Hollywood blockbusters, the horror genre goes through phases of acute innovation, aggressive imitation, and creative devastation. Halloween cemented the formula for the golden age of the slasher film. Saw trailblazed the torture porn genre of the 00's. Now horror in the 10's seems to be congealing around the brainy indie horror prospects offered by Jennifer Kent's 2014 film The Babadook. These films are low budget but high concept, often with a heavy thematic underpinning that has to do with Serious Issues.

As yet, Lights Out might be the most unabashed benefactor of the model set down by The Babadook. Both are stories about children struggling with the specter of their mothers' chronic depression, as made manifest by a horrible shadow creature infiltrating their home. Despite the clear similarities, the experience of watching Lights Out feels visually and structurally different enough to avoid being branded an out and out copycat. Unfortunately, where the films do overlap, Lights Out is worse in every way.

The protagonist of the film is pretty girl Rebecca (Teresa Palmer). We are introduced to her in a cutesy dialogue exchange with her sort-of boyfriend, pretty boy Bret (Alexander DiPersia). From there, these two characters get embroiled in the plight of Rebecca's little brother, Martin (Gabriel Bateman), who has been dealing with a mother who speaks to the darkness as if someone is speaking back. But Rebecca has discovered that someone really is there: a predatory silhouette named Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey). She is a visible, physical threat in the darkness, but disappears entirely when exposed to any light source. Rebecca soon learns that her family will never be safe from Diana unless they confront the problem head on. These are the basic building blocks for our drama.


Everything in Lights Out is baseline functional, which is no small feat in this genre. The characters as written are ciphers with a handful of strong moments to keep them from feeling entirely stale. The performers follow suit by being just likable enough, although I found Gabriel Bateman as Martin to be incredibly endearing (though not as flat out talented as his analogue in The Babadook). His line readings are heartwrenching. Even the boyfriend character, who I was absolutely prepared to disdain, comes off fairly well.

The plot is alright. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer does a good job of stretching out a scary gag* to feature length, and he succeeds in pacing everything out so that we are always on edge. Perhaps the screenplay's slickest move is dumping the cumbersome expository backstory on us early in the proceedings. Most horror films delay the reveal interminably so as to cling desperately to their monster's mystique, but the nature of Diana is such that knowledge about her only makes her more threatening. Meanwhile, the exploration of depression isn't much more than Babadook-lite. It makes for a solid underpinning until the film's climactic moment, when a character makes a choice that is a perfect narrative tie-up, but an incredibly irresponsible thematic misstep.

*The director of this film shot a short film by the same name a few years ago that is basically a proof of concept for how goshdarned terrifying the idea could be. Here it is on youtube.

Yet the element that raises Lights Out above its mediocre component parts is Diana herself. She is instantly iconic. Even given her admittedly silly backstory, she inspires terror whenever she is present, and dread whenever she is absent. The concept behind the character is excellent; the execution is even better. Cinematographer Marc Spicer expertly differentiates gradients of darkness and layers of shadow. I can only imagine realizing a shadow creature that can only be seen when it is also wreathed in shadows would be a daunting task, but Spicer manages to have his cake and eat it too.

The visceral impact of Diana would be considerably lessened without top notch sound design. It has been some time since I saw the film and the sound of Diana scratching at the wooden floor, really digging her claws right in there, has been etched in my memory. For a difficult to spot baddie who could be anywhere at anytime, at least half the tension comes from precisely orchestrated noises.

It's clear to me that director Sandberg is a proper maestro. I've seen far better horror films, more engaging and scarier, but I don't know that I've ever experienced a film so jam packed with perfect jump scares. A good jump scare is like a wristwatch: all the elements must be in sync, and the timing must be flawless for the whole to function. That metaphor breaks down when it comes to repetition though. A wristwatch must always repeat itself, whereas jump scares suffer from the law of diminishing returns. If you catch an audience off guard once, they will be ready and wary for the next time you bust out that technique. As such, horror films must perpetually innovate if they don't want to crap out by the final act.

Lights Out somehow manages to make every single jump scare work. Sandberg engages in movielong psychological warfare with the audience. With each scare, our knowledge and paranoia increase in ways that cause us to make fresh subliminal assumptions about how and where the next scare will come--assumptions that are played with and violated by the filmmakers. Scariness is subjective of course, and I'm sure plenty of folks drifted through this movie without blinking an eye. But Lights Out played me like a fiddle.

That alone makes Lights Out worthy of recommendation, even as its narrative scaffolding lets its technical proficiency down. See it for the heebie jeebies. They are choice.

3 / 5  BLOBS